2016 In Context: The Peeping Tom – and Tammy – Election

Gil Troy is the author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, just published by Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin's Press. His next book will update Arthur Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea. He is Professor of History at McGill University. Follow on Twitter @GilTroy

Click HERE for more installments of 2016 In Context: Gil Troy's commentary on the closing days of the election.

Three weeks from today,
Americans finally will have a chance to vote for president of the United States
-- hundreds of other offices on ballots across the country. As a presidential
historian who has written histories of presidential campaigning, of various
presidents, of First Ladies, including Hillary Clinton when she was in that
symbolic role, and, most recently, of the Clintons and the 1990s in The
Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, every day until Election Day I will post
an article putting this election in historical context, trying to explain this
wild and wacky race using history as our guide. So here it goes, with
hashtag #2016incontext

Shocked by how all these
“recent inventions and business methods” have “invaded the sacred precincts of
private and domestic life,” appalled that with “the press … overstepping in
every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency” gossip “has become
a trade,” two legal crusaders warned that “what is whispered in the closet
shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.” Although the two law partners, Louis
Brandeis and Samuel Warren, werewritingin
1890, they anticipated our brutal, bizarre 2016 Peeping Tom – and Tammy – campaign. This presidential election may be determined by two dramatic
invasions of privacy – our mass eavesdropping on Donald Trump’s crass
conversation with Billy Bush in 2005 and our collective snooping into the
leaked emails of Hillary Clinton, Debra Wasserman Schultz, John Podesta, and
others.

The fact that revelations of private
exchanges threaten to be more influential this election cycle than public
pronouncements about policy or ideology, suggests how debased our public
discourse has become. We have plummeted a long way
from an election like 1896 that pivoted around William JenningsBryan’seloquent
rejection of a gold standard by saying: “you shall not press down upon
the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a
cross of gold.” “Make America Great Again” and “Stronger Together” are far cries
fromFranklin
Roosevelt’s 1932 Acceptance address concluding: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

But even more disturbing is
the way we all collude in repeated invasions of privacy, trampling on what
Warren and Brandeis celebrated as the precious “right to be left alone.” In
their now-classicHarvard Law
Review article, the two traced the law’s development. Originally, legal
protections punished “physical interference.” With growing “recognition” of our
“spiritual nature,” our “feelings” and “intellect,” “the scope of these legal
rights broadened.” Now,the term "property"
has grown to comprise every form of possession – intangible, as well as
tangible.”

In his famous Olmsteaddissentin
1928, Louis Brandeis, now a Supreme Court Justice, considered “the right to
privacy” essential “to the pursuit of happiness.” At the time, Brandeis worried
about government intrusions on these rights. Our world teaches us that media –
and mass – intrusions are no better.

We need to treat illegal
hacks as piracy -- meaning the theft of intellectual property – and the
information garnered from “Wikileaks” and other such pirates as stolen
property. In that vein, anyone who passes on illegally obtained information is no
better than the spouse of a jewel thief who knowingly wears a stolen diamond
necklace.

This campaign is not the
first contest to peep behind a politician’s public veneer and expose the
hypocrisy that is as natural to politics as bats are to baseball. The Framers
of the Constitution began with a reversed equation. They assumed that when
people like George Washington paraded around as paragons of virtue in public,
it reflected their private virtue. More broadly, Americans in the early nation
linked individual and communal virtue. A president’s example gives “a tone to
[the] moral pulse of the nation,” theAlbany
Argusexplained in 1844.

But by mid-century,
one’s public role was no longer the crucial determinant of one’s “character.”
Educators like Horace Mann and Ralph Waldo Emerson preached that individual
moral behavior bettered one’s “self” and improved society. “Character” now
implied ethical conduct. A man “pure and upright in his private character,” theArgus continued, “is the only
safe depository of public trust. . . . The vices and immoralities of private
life will be carried into the public administration.” Just as a merchant would
not select a clerk whose habits were immoral, or parents hire a teacher prone
to vice, so should Americans protect themselves from the libertine and gambler,
Henry Clay, the Democratic newspaper concluded.

Inevitably, then, there has
always been a “Gotcha” element to American campaigning, seeking to unmask the
true stinker behind all the perfumed peacocking. The 1884 campaign probably had
the most influential leak in nineteenth-century American history, when onSeptember
15that year
– not quite an October surprisethe Boston Journalpublished Republican nominee James G.
Blaine’s 1876 correspondence with a businessman, Warren Fisher, Jr., supplied
by James Mulligan, once Fisher’s clerk. Fisher had helped Blaine sell some
near-worthless railroad bonds in a series of questionable but profitable
transactions. In one of these “Mulligan Letters,” Blaine ghostwrote a letter
for Fisher exonerating himself. In the accompanying cover letter, Blaine
explained the ruse and instructed: “Burn this letter.” Instead, “Burn this
letter” became the cry of Democrats all over the country, as they denounced,
“James, James, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the State of Maine.”

Of course, Americans have
long loved gossiping about their political leaders, wondering about their
private lives. Ironically, despite all the sanctimony coming from the Clinton
camp these days about Donald Trump’s boorish behavior, Bill and Hillary Clinton
spent much of the 1990s arguing for what Hillary Clinton back then called a
“zone of privacy” and against what Bill Clinton condemned as“the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private
lives” at the cost of our “national life.”

But our age of electronic
voyeurism, where everyone is an aspiring Bob Woodward or Matt Drudge has
created a nation of Peeping Toms and Tammys. As a result, in 2008, Barack Obama
was embarrassed when a sympatheticHuffington Post bloggerwho was following him around recorded
his obnoxious riff at a San Francisco fundraiser that many of the people in
small town America“get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”Four years
later,Mother
Jonespublicized a
surreptitiously recordedvideoof
what it called Mitt Romney “raw and unplugged” dismissing the“47 percent who are with” Barack Obama “who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a
responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Romney was outed by the bartender
who worked the event,Scott Prouty.

We have long known that a
political gaffe is a politician caught in the act of being frank – or honest.
And not every act of revelation is similar. Still, citizens should want
politicians to have candid exchanges with their advisers on email, without
fearing exposure of every half-baked idea, stupid qucip, and annoying
correspondent. And those Democrats who were able to forgive Bill Clinton’s sins
as “private,” irrelevant to his job, should be equally forgiving of Donald
Trump, just as those Republicans who refused to forgive Bill Clinton should be
equally condemning of Donald Trump.

Moreover, we need a fuller
policy debate between our two leading nominees that goes beyond bluster and
character assassination. This election, like many, ultimately triggers two
central worries that haunted the Framers of the Constitution. Our country’s
founders feared the kind of demagoguery Donald Trump exhibits as well as the
reliance on government that has been the hallmark of Hillary Clinton’s career.
This election is a lost opportunity to have the kind of bracing debate that
help democracies mature.

Ultimately, however, this
election reflects the loss of privacy we all experience by living on Facebook
and Instagram, by being photographed and recorded practically wherever we are,
by friends and foes alike. This most cherished right of privacy that Brandeis
saw as so central to a happy and healthy life not just a functional democracy
is missing, not just in this campaign, but in our lives.